[Pan-users] Re: Authentication and upgrade paths (was: ANN: Pan 0.90 "Sero Sed Serio")

[Jim Henderson]

On Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:27:38 -0500, Charles Kerr wrote:

>> 1.  NNTP authentication not used unless server requires it (bug #333216
>> in bugzilla) - I had reported this in the CVS 0.14.2 series (not in the
>> "released" version, which I currently use).  I had been previously
>> reported this in the 0.8 or 0.7 timeframe and it was fixed, but the fix
>> appears to not have been carried forward with the NNTP engine rewrite.
> 
> Attached is a patch for this.

Great, thanks for the quick turnaround on this.

>> 2.  With leafnode, I never can get a list of groups.  Not sure why yet -
>> debug output isn't helping much with this, though.  I can telnet to
>> localhost 119 and list the groups by hand fine, so it's not a leafnode
>> configuration issue.  (I figured leafnode would be a temporary
>> workaround to issue #1)
> 
> Uncommenting the lines containing `LINE_ID' in tasks/socket-impl-gio.cc
> will give you more helpful debugging info.

Will do (probably tomorrow or weds) to see what's going on - wondering if
anyone else is seeing this as well.

>> 4.  The spec file doesn't supercede older installed versions, but the
>> RPM does overwrite the installed pan executable in /usr/bin.  I know
>> just enough about building RPMs to be dangerous, so I'm not sure how to
>> correct this.  Since it creates a '.pan2' directory to store its files,
>> perhaps the binary should also be called 'pan2' so as to not conflict
>> with the earlier release (which should allow both to be run
>> concurrently)?  The package also could then be "pan2" rather than "pan"
>> to avoid the conflict.
> 
> I'm going to plead ignorance here.  Would it be better for the spec file
> to say that 0.9x supercedes older installed versions?  I don't see much
> point in keeping both versions around, at least after the crasher bugs are
> shaken out of 0.9x.

I'm not sure which would be the better route - on the one hand, keeping
both versions around after the crasher bugs are dealt with seems silly,
but on the other hand, being able to compare an old install with a new one
concurrently might be a nice idea, since the configurations can't be
easily moved.  I'm assuming things like scoring and rules work a little
differently as well, so they may not translate properly either - so being
able to compare two running installations would definitely make that
easier.  I do notice that the Score file from 0.14.x is parsed during
startup of 0.90, though.

>> 5.  As others indicated, a way to migrate existing settings from 0.14.x
>> to 0.90 would be great.  Could this possibly be done using newsrc files?
> 
> Users can move newsrc files over by hand, but since that's the _only_
> overlap between the two versions' data formats, there's not much to be
> gained from automating it.

Good to know, thanks.

Jim